


children who start fires

by lagaudiere



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-29
Updated: 2016-07-29
Packaged: 2018-07-27 10:37:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7614787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lagaudiere/pseuds/lagaudiere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He isn't taking the lightsaber from her. He's just looking back at her, eyes blank, face inscrutable. He does look like a Jedi, like he might know all the secrets in the universe and have already judged Rey unworthy to share them."</p><p>Rey tries to learn how to be a Jedi, and Luke tries to learn how not to be alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	children who start fires

"So," Luke Skywalker says, "do you know how to use that?" 

Rey has felt a lot of strange things lately, but nothing quite like looking at the only other person in the world. 

He isn't taking the lightsaber from her. He's just looking back at her, eyes blank, face inscrutable. He does look like a Jedi, like he might know all the secrets in the universe and have already judged Rey unworthy to share them. 

"I've used it," she says, and lets the hand holding the saber fall to her side. 

"Well then," he says, "I can help you." 

Rey expects some kind of ceremony, a transfer of force powers in some secret Jedi handshake maybe, but Luke Skywalker just keeps looking at her evenly, like she's the one who should be breaking the silence. 

"What do you do here, all alone?" she says finally. 

"A planet is a big place, Rey, although I understand how you can feel trapped on one." He smiles ruefully. "I read, mostly. I still have a net connection." 

He seems completely calm, as if her coming here hasn't surprised him at all. 

"I should tell you," Rey says. "Your friend, Han--" 

Luke shakes his head, holds out a hand to cut her off. "I know," he says. "I felt it as soon as it happened." 

"Through the Force?" Rey asks. 

A darker expression flits across Luke's face. Rey remembers who trained Kylo Ren when he was still Han's son Ben and thinks it might be guilt. 

"If you have a connection with someone, you'll know." 

***  
Han tells him about the marriage and the baby on the same day. He drags Luke to a seedy bar and blurts it all out practically in one breath. 

“But I'm not doing it because I feel like I have to marry her,” Han says in a rush. “I really want to, I want us to be a family. Try to be. You understand, right?” 

“I think you're a little drunk,” Luke says. 

Han laughs and claps him on the back fondly. 

“I know it’s awkward,” he says, “because she's your sister.” 

Han’s hand has settled on Luke’s shoulder and Luke almost wants to shrug it off. It feels like it's burning him. Han is having a baby with Leia, he tells himself, trying to make it sink in as something that's real. They're going to have a baby. And that means that this, the way he feels when Han looks at him, the bitter jealousy he tries to fight when he sees him with Leia, the paradoxical closeness and distance between them that Luke feels powerless to change - all of that is permanent, a part of his life that won't ever change. 

Sometimes he feels like Han and Leia’s lives are moving forward and his is already over. Han is well on his way to being a legitimate businessman. Leia’s been given high-ranking positions in the military and in the new government as a diplomat. Luke is just a pilot. He doesn't know how to be anything else. 

They saved the galaxy, he reminds himself. He shouldn't have to wonder if this is all there is. 

“It's not awkward,” he says. “I'm really happy for you.” 

“We want you to be involved,” Han says. “With the baby.” He grins. “We’ll be a family.”

***

Luke shows Rey where he lives, a little house built into the side of a cliff. It looks lived-in - he's brought in plants - but also bare and isolated, clearly the home of a person who lives alone and has for a long time. Rey looks for a tally of days on the walls. 

She doesn't want to ask too many questions, but it seems wrong. She almost wants to get angry, ask him why he would throw away the company of people who care about him, a family, when it's all she's ever wanted. 

"It isn't much," Luke says, as if he understands. "But it's all I needed. All I wanted." 

He motions to Rey to sit down, but there's only one chair - also stone. She sits at his feet, legs crossed, feeling more and more like a student. 

"I'm from Jakku," she says, in response to Luke's continued silence. "At least, I lived there. My parents left me there when I was young. I was waiting for them to come back." She takes a deep breath. "But I met Finn, he told me he was with the resistance but he was really a Stormtrooper - but a good one - and we had to leave the planet because of this droid, his friend's droid, but the First Order wanted it and I fought Kylo Ren and I, ah, realized I had the Force." 

She pauses, but he just looks at her with a slight smile. "So we found the map to you and General Leia told me to go and ask you to train me. So that's why I'm here. Sorry," she finishes lamely. 

Luke gives her a small smile, a hint of lines at the corner of his eyes. "It's been a long time since I had a student," he says, "but I'll do my best." 

"Thank you," Rey says, and she feels the inadequacy of anything more she could say, compared to the weight of what they both have to do. 

"Well," Luke says, "do you have any questions? Besides the philosophical ones." 

Rey does, and she'd almost hoped he wouldn't ask. 

"Yes," she says tentatively. "You said that when Han died you knew... because you had a connection..." 

Luke closes his eyes for a moment, but only a moment, as if he's trying not to get lost in thought. "That happens to many people with Force abilities, yes." 

"Then I should have felt it," Rey says. "When something happened to my family, when they couldn't come back for me, I should have felt it." 

Luke shakes his head firmly. 

"Rey, you were young and untrained." 

"I should have felt it," she mutters, feeling a little sick. 

 

***  
The truth is that Ben Organa Solo was never an easy kid. 

Luke never used the Force as a child, never thought about having it until he was in a situation where he needed to use it. Leia’s abilities are buried even deeper; she still rarely uses them, says it just doesn't come naturally to her. Most of Luke’s handful of new students, sent to him by concerned parents or seeking him out on their own after hearing stories about him, are the same. They use their abilities when they're in danger - otherwise, they might as well be completely ordinary. 

Ben is different. Ben is, from an early age, obvious. When he wants something, Han and Leia give it to him and don't remember doing it afterwards. When he cries, walls shake and plaster falls from the ceiling. 

“I can't do it anymore, Luke,” Leia tells him when he visits. “He needs something more than I can give.” 

“You're his mother,” Luke says, incredulously. 

Leia bites her lip hard. “I don't understand him. He doesn't even like me or Han. He needs to be around people like him. Please, Luke, I'm not saying it'll be forever. Just until he learns to control it.” 

Luke looks at his sister, the most certain and steady person he knows, and she looks on the verge of tears.

“I'm going to talk to him,” Luke says. 

He finds Ben sitting on the back steps, drawing circles in the dirt with a stick from ten feet away. He looks miserable.

“Hey, kid, did something bad happen?” Luke asks. 

Ben scowls bitterly. “Mom’s mad at me.” 

“Where’s your dad?” 

“In space,” Ben says. “He’s always gone.” He gives Luke a searching look. “Did I do something wrong?” 

Luke tries not to be angry at Han and Leia, but looking at Ben curled up on the steps, small and afraid, it's hard not to. 

“I'll tell you a secret,” Luke says. “You and me, we’re special. We can do all kinds of things your mom and dad can't. If you lived with them, you'd never learn all the things you can do.” 

“You have to show me?” Ben says. 

“That's right. We’re different from most people, Ben, but that's a good thing.” 

Ben smiles at him. “I think I want to learn,” he says. 

*** 

The Force isn't quite science, and it isn't quite magic like they said in the stories on the spaceports back home. Luke says that she doesn't have to understand it completely. 

Rey understands how to fix a droid and how to steer a ship, and that felt like instinct, but it's nothing like this.

She practices moving things with the Force, and it's easy, as easy as breathing. Sometimes it's exhilarating, watching as she uses her mind to pick up boulders and toss them over cliffs into the ocean. Sometimes it scares her a little, seeing the impact. 

The other part, the part Luke calls the Jedi mind trick, is harder. She's not a natural at that. 

Luke is the only person she has to practice on, and she tries, but something about it always feels wrong, even if all she's trying to make him do is walk a few steps and pick up a tree branch. 

"I'm training you for battle," Luke says. "It's important." 

Rey bites her lip and thinks about Kylo Ren falling to the ground in front of her, blood running into the snow. It seemed far away here, on the coast of an island with no name. 

"I don't like it," Rey mumbles, kicking belligerently at the sand. "People's free will shouldn't be taken away like that." 

He frowns. “So if someone wants to hurt other people, you should just let them?” 

“No!” she says, frustrated. “But I should be able to find some other way to stop them, right? What makes this the light side of the Force and not the dark side?” 

“If someone is holding a lightsaber that can kill you,” Luke says, “you take it away.” He shakes his head. “The right thing to do isn't actions, Rey. It's motivations. There are things that are worth from the your moral compass, and saving innocent lives is one of them. Do you understand?” 

Rey’s cheeks burn with embarrassment. Should have known better, she scolds herself. A real Jedi would've have to ask. 

"I'll learn it," she mumbles. 

Luke says she's better at it than he ever was. He won't let her pick up the lightsaber again yet. 

***  
It’s reassuring when Ben turns out to be a fast learner. 

He picks up the art of using the Force so easily Luke wonders why he even needed a teacher at all. Ben doesn't seem to have any trouble controlling his gifts. It's just that now he seems to have less need to use them to get what he wants. 

Ben devours Luke’s stories, too - he can't hear enough about their family history, in the abbreviated form Luke tells it. 

“That was my grandfather?” he says with incredulity when Luke tries to explain why it's important to only use the light side of the Force to a classroom full of children. 

“Yes,” Luke says awkwardly, “but before he died, he was very sorry.”

Ben stares at him with wide-eyed awe, and Luke tries not to notice when the other children stare at Ben. 

Sometimes Luke wishes he knew more, had asked Obi Wan more, about what Anakin Skywalker was like when he was younger. Then he would know what to watch for in his students - what to watch for, if he’s honest, in his nephew, because surely part of the problem must be in their blood. 

For now he avoids teaching Ben any more about his power to control others’ minds. He doesn't give Ben any weapons, even when he enviously watches the other students sparring and asks when he can practice too. “Not yet,” is all Luke says. “You're too young.” 

When Han and Leia visit, he gives them glowing reports on their son’s progress. Ben shows Han and Chewie his newest trick, moving the water out of the way so he doesn't get wet when it rains. Leia quietly tells Luke that she's grateful, and that they've decided not to have any more children. 

***

Rey had imagined that learning how to be a Jedi would involve a lot of meditation and chanting odes to the light side of the Force. Luke doesn't talk about that side of it much at all. 

"It doesn't have to be a religion," Luke says when she asks. "There's a scientific side to it as well." 

That doesn't satisfy Rey. Science doesn't have a dark and light side. 

“What makes something light, then?” she presses. “Is it how you use it?” 

“Why does this matter to you?” Luke asks. 

“Because I'm supposed to learn to be a Jedi!” she protests. “Didn't you teach your students this kind of thing?” 

Luke gets this look in his eyes then that she sees sometimes, when he has to talk about the past. It tells her that in his mind he's somewhere else entirely, that maybe the person he's imagining speaking to isn't Rey at all. 

“I told my students that there was a balance to the Force,” he says. “That the operation of the universe requires both dark and light. But I never told them why they should chose the light. They didn't know my father.” 

“I’d never choose the dark side,” Rey says stubbornly. 

Luke smiles gently at her. “I don't believe you would. In any case, I'm not concerned about that now. I don't know whether the universe needs a dark side, but as far as I’m concerned it doesn't need any more innocent people to die. There will never be balance in that.” 

Rey falls silent for a moment. He's right, she supposes. Maybe it's better if she attributes all this to midichlorians. Maybe that would have helped Ben Solo. 

“Can we practice dueling soon?” she asks Luke. 

“Soon,” he says. “You'll need your own lightsaber.” 

The next morning Luke slides something to her across the breakfast table - a data pad, loaded with dozens of books and papers about the Force. 

“Scientific and spiritual,” he tells her. “Jedi and Sith. I thought you'd better hear all sides of the story.” 

Rey grins.

***  
Han and Leia fight. It's what they do. Luke had always regarded it as something like the mating ritual of an alien species - it doesn't make sense to him, but for their purpose, it always seemed to work perfectly. 

Ben doesn't think so. 

“I hate them,” he informs Luke for the first time at age ten, after a weekend together that had ended in a stony-faced Leia dropping him off at Luke’s doorstep with a stiff, forced hug goodbye. “I don't want to go see them anymore.” 

Luke represses a sigh. Most of his students live for the times they can show off their new training to people from back home, but of course Ben isn't most people. 

“Did something happen?” he asks. “Do you want to talk about it?” 

“No,” Ben says petulantly, and falls silent, looking down at his feet. “They kept fighting the whole time,” he says after a while. 

“I'm sure it wasn't anything serious,” Luke says. “Your mom and dad love each other.” 

Ben’s eyes are dark. Luke can hear glasses rattling agitatedly in the kitchen cabinets and puts his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “Remember to control your feelings,” he says. 

“Why don't they control theirs?” Ben says bitterly, and tears himself away from Luke’s hand. Before Luke can reply, he stomps upstairs to his bedroom, scowling. 

Luke makes a mental note to talk to Leia. He’ll regret taking it so lightly, later, but how could he have known what it meant? How could he have fixed any of it, before it all fell apart? 

*** 

Luke, Rey discovers, has made her her own lightsaber. 

She's relieved to discover it isn't red; it's blue, like his, and in fact it isn't very different from his at all. But it's built for her hand, the weight balanced just for her. The feeling of holding it is something else new, a power flowing seamlessly between her and the weapon, like they're one being. 

“I don't know what to say,” she says. “Thank you.” 

“Every Jedi knight should have one,” Luke says. 

Rey grins and nervously spins the saber in her hands, trying to remember the best way to stand: one foot in front of the other, she thinks, knees bent. 

“Can we practice?” she asks Luke eagerly. 

“We can,” he says, laughing, “but you'll have to go easy on me.” 

Outside, she takes the best approximation she knows of a dueling stance, then imitates what Luke’s going across from her. He bows to her, and she reciprocates. It's a little bit of a relief; it takes away the feeling of being in a real fight. 

Then Luke’s lightsaber strikes towards her. 

Rey blocks the blow, and the next one, and the next few after that; she feels the advantages of being younger, faster. But she can't get in anything herself either, can't get past Luke’s defenses. 

Sooner than she expects, he wears her down, and his blade is knocking hers aside. It's on the ground before she has time to react, and a moment of panic overwhelms her until Luke drops his as well. 

“Good first try,” he says, and she thinks that he looks proud of her. 

Rey grabs both of their weapons off the ground. “What did I do wrong?” she says. “I couldn't get anything past you.” 

“It was your first try,” Luke says. He accepts the saber that she holds out to him and dusts it off. “The most important thing you can work on is confidence. Follow through when you start to strike. Don't hesitate.” 

Rey looks down at the blade of light in her hand and tries to forget that it was made to kill. 

“Another round,” she says. 

***  
One of the hardest lessons to explain to the students is the part about attachments, and the rules against forming them. 

Ben is a sulky and gangly twelve when Luke tries to explain it to him. He doesn't listen anymore to rules about mind tricks or staying away from lightsabers. He doesn't listen to much that Luke says anymore, and the idea that “intimate attachments”, as Luke awkwardly puts it, cloud your judgment, doesn't seem to impress him. 

“Is that why Mom isn't a Jedi?” Ben says, contemptuous. 

“No,” Luke says, feeling defensive of his sister. “She decided to pursue other things. She's a very accomplished military leader.” 

“I don't understand why she’d choose getting married over learning to use the Force,” Ben says. “She and my father don’t even like each other. She could have had a much better life.” 

He doesn't say it sadly, just like he's stating a fact that should be obvious. 

“Han and Leia love each other very much,” Luke says flatly. “No one can have everything.” 

“Is that why you never got married?” Ben drawls. 

Luke fights down his annoyance. 

“Having a family is important, but Jedi are called to something else,” he says, avoiding the question. “Valuing some lives above others leads to poor choices. That's what happened to my father.” His father tends to end conversations. His favorite cautionary tale. 

“I understand, Uncle Luke,” Ben says, drily. “Can I go now?” 

Luke nods curtly. 

Ben continues not to show any particular interest in the girls - or the other boys - Luke teaches. Ben isn't generally interested in other people. 

It could be a good thing, Luke tells himself, when he sees Ben reading alone while the other students cluster together. It could be good not to need other people like that. 

If the Force makes some kind of choice among its users, Luke can understand why it would choose Ben, or someone like Obi Wan Kenobi. Ben seems like the kind of person who could spend years in isolation and be perfectly fine. 

A Jedi should learn to be alright with that, should make peace with being alone, should know they're been given a greater gift than a lover or a family and accept that with no jealousy or resentment. 

Luke says it, but he can't make himself feel it yet. 

***

"On Jakku," Rey says one night, "in the stories about the Jedi order, they used to say they weren't allowed to have a family. They weren't allowed to fall in love." 

Luke looks at the over his bowl of soup with a suspicious expression. "Is there someone waiting for you on Jakku?" 

"No," Rey says firmly, "I just wondered, that's all. What you thought." 

"That isn't why I came here," Luke says. 

"But do you believe in that?" she presses. "Do you think it makes you a better Jedi, to be alone?" 

"There are only two of us now," Luke says, "and I would never want that for you." 

Silence falls again and Rey eats the rest of her soup, trying to remember to do it the way other people do, slow and cautious not to spill anything on her clothes. 

"So were you ever in love?" she asks finally, when the curiosity is too much. 

Luke laughs. Rey can't remember if she's heard him do that before, and it startles her enough that she almost drops her spoon. 

"Let an old man have some secrets," Luke says. 

 

***

“He's leaving,” Leia says. “Simple as that.” 

She's sitting behind her desk with her usual ramrod straight posture. Her voice isn't exactly emotionless, but it mostly just sounds tired. 

He should have known something was wrong between Han and Leia. They've both been avoiding speaking to him, especially Han. It had taken 

Luke searches for the appropriate emotion 

“That doesn't sound simple,” Luke settles on saying. 

“I did my best,” Leia says. “It didn't last.” 

Luke looks at the papers on her desk and the severe lines around her eyes and wonders when their lives got so far apart. 

“How am I supposed to tell your son?” Luke says. 

Leia sighs dismissively. “I'll tell him myself.” 

“Do you think he wants to hear that from you?” Luke snaps, without meaning to. “He's already angry with both of you.” 

Leia’s eyes flash anger. “Why would he be?”

“You've seen him once a month since he was eight years old. I know how he feels. I raised him.” 

“Do not make this about you, Luke!” Her eyes flash with the righteous look she gets when she’s confronted with someone whose opinion she plans to totally disregard. “This is about my marriage.” 

Luke wants to tell her it isn't fair; not that he's the one who will have to deal with the consequences, not that he will be the likely immediate target of Ben’s anger, not that he will have to scrupulously avoid choosing a side. It isn't fair that he's been telling himself for years that he’s made sacrifices and compromises for Han and Leia and now Han and Leia have decided it isn't worth the effort. It isn't fair that Leia has what he wanted and is so willing to give it up. It isn't fair that her face is set in a stoic stare forward while he, Jedi master Luke Skywalker, wants to cry. 

“It's my family,” he manages to say. 

“Oh please, Luke,” Leia says, her eyes flicking back down to her paperwork. “He isn't leaving you.” 

*** 

She cuts her hair herself, outside on the beach, trying to watch her reflection in the ocean water. In the end she just swipes the knife through it quickly--it doesn't matter what it looks like. 

It falls to about her chin, uneven and jagged, and her head feels lighter than it has in her entire life. 

"You look different," Luke says knowingly when she comes back.

"Time for a change," Rey says lightly. She spins her saber around in her hand, feeling a strange rush of energy. "Ready to go a few rounds, old man?" 

Luke gives her a curious look. "You seem like you're in a good mood." 

"Lots of energy," Rey says. "I could fight the whole whole First Order right now." 

She grins at Luke, but he doesn't return it. He crosses their small living space and holds out his hand for the lightsaber. 

Rey considers protesting for a moment, but it seems pointless when Luke could just use the Force to pull it out of her hand anyway. She drops it into his hand and can almost immediately feel the excited energy draining from her body, replaced by nothing by a strange hollowness. 

"I've had the same hair since - forever," she says. "I always kept it the same. I thought maybe... maybe if my family saw it, they'd remember who I was." 

Luke raises an eyebrow. "Any reason to cut it now?" 

"If they left me there..." She sucks in a long, shuddering breath. "If they left me and they aren't looking for me, then I won't live my life for them." 

 

He nods immediately, like he understands. “I'm proud of you,” he says. 

Rey startles. “You are?” 

“I don't know what kind of family wouldn't want you,” Luke says, “but I am glad they gave us the opportunity to meet.” 

Rey, at the same moment, throws her arms around him and bursts into tears. 

He lets her cry, lets her hold onto him and try to hide her tears by pressing her face into his shoulder. 

"It's alright, Rey," he tells her. "You are so much more than where you came from." 

*** 

Han comes to the school to see Ben. Ben doesn't want to see him. 

That’s the last time Luke sees Han, before they both lose Ben. That's how Luke will think of it later, losing Ben, because he will hold onto hope that the little boy he taught and cared for and loved is there somewhere. 

“I don't think I should be taking all the blame for this,” Han says, half seriously and half joking, sitting in Luke’s kitchen with a cup of tea and the vague hope that Ben will decide to emerge from his bedroom. “I'm the one who gave up my career for her.”

“Your career was illegal,” Luke says drily. 

Han wakes a hand dismissively. “Still.” 

He falls silent, contemplative. Luke sips his tea anxiously, 

“Maybe I should have known better,” Han says abruptly. “Maybe I just wasn't cut out for this. We should never have gotten married.” 

Luke’s stomach does a sort of queasy flip, half irritation, half something else he tries not to think about. “Don't say that.” 

Han scoffs. “Why not? What exactly did we do right? And don't say raising Ben. We both know you did that.” 

“You loved each other,” Luke says, helplessly. 

Han closes his eyes. “It’s not enough. It didn't matter. I wasn't the kind of person she needed - hell, she didn't need anyone. I was always in her way. I knew that.” 

“Why did you do it, then?” Luke says recklessly. 

Han sighs. “I wanted to someone else, I guess. Someone better.” 

Luke suddenly feels furious with Leia, for the defeat in Han’s voice and the years of conflict that must have gone on without his knowledge, no matter how much it affected his life, how much it would've mattered to him. “There's nothing wrong with who you are, Han,” he says, defensively. “You just - it just didn't work out, that's all.” 

Han smiles at him, gently, sadly, like he doesn't really believe it. “Thanks, kid,” he says. “Means a lot that you don't, you know, hate me.” 

“Of course,” Luke says. “You're my best friend.” 

***

 

“My aunt and uncle raised me,” Luke tells her later. They're sitting out on the beach and he's showing her how far you can skip rocks with the Force. He helped her with her hair a little, cut the uneven strands into a straight line. 

It felt nice to have someone do that for her. She keeps looking at her reflection nervously, but she likes the way it looks. 

“They were killed when I was young, by the empire,” Luke continues. “Leia’s adopted parents were as well - her whole planet, in fact. And of course we never really got to know our real parents.” 

Rey sends another rock skimming across the waves. “Well,” she says, “maybe my parents left me on a garbage planet, but at least they weren't Sith Lords.”

Luke laughs, genuine and loud, and Rey thinks about how nice it is to hear that. Luke seems like a person who had almost forgotten how to laugh. 

“Does it ever get any easier?” she asks him. “Missing people, I mean, your family.” 

“No, I don't think so,” Luke says. “Even if you don't know who to miss.” 

Rey hugs her knees to her chest and watches the ten-legged sea creatures with stalked eyes who populate Luke’s beaches skitter along the sand. 

“Maybe we have to make new families,” she says. She looks up to meet Luke’s eyes. “We can't stay on this planet forever. Either of us.” 

Luke just gives her his thin, distant smile. “I had a family,” he says. “Leia and Ben. And Han.” 

Rey feels like there isn't a right way to try to respond to that, but she tries to think of one anyway. “I'm glad that I got to meet him,” she says. 

“So am I.” Luke smiles his far-away smile. “He was… the bravest person I knew. That helps me, that I know he wouldn't have been afraid. He would have done anything for Ben.” 

Ben. Rey can't get used to the name. “Do you think he could change?” she asks. “Kyl - your nephew, I mean?” 

“No.” Luke’s voice is unexpectedly harsh and final. “He won't, and I should have known that, I should have stopped him before he could hurt Han.” 

Rey hears his voice crack slightly. “He just wanted to make things right. And now he's gone.” 

Rey tries to remember how people respond in these circumstances, what people do when someone else is crying. She remembers how much better she felt when Leia hugged her at the base, and she wraps an arm around Luke’s shoulders, pulling him close. 

"You loved him, didn't you?" Rey says. “Han.” 

She knows that maybe most people wouldn't say it, but if Luke wants to talk about it, she should give him that chance. She shouldn't watch him hurting and pretend not to understand. 

Luke shakes his head, not in refutation, more like he's trying to brush the question away. “Does it matter?” he says, voice heavy with sadness. 

“I think it matters,” Rey says. “If it matters to you, it matters to me.” 

Rey rests her head on his shoulder, and they stay silent together, looking out at the ocean, for a long time. 

***

“He can't be gone,” Leia says. 

She's standing in the middle of the ruins of the school Luke has spent his life building, the work that it had taken Ben only moments to destroy, and her eyes are resigned. Her voice is flat and calculating. 

“If he’s left the planet, there's still a limited range of places he could be,” Leia says. “He can't hide from the Republic. He should have remembered that.” 

Her bearing is military, her spine ramrod straight. Luke understands it, more than he wants to, that ability to put everything aside but the mission in front of her. It makes sense, he thinks, for the two of them to be standing here, the two Skywalker children, Anakin’s blood finally catching up with them. 

“He won't come back,” Luke says. “He has no intention of changing his mind, Leia.” 

Ben told him that himself, with a lightsaber to his throat. Ben had chosen the other side, as maybe Luke should have known he would. There had been signs. He’d ignored them. 

“He's a fugitive from justice now,” Leia says shortly. “He’ll come, willingly or not.” She holds out her hand and, numbly, he lets her take it. “He will face the consequences of what he did, I promise.”

“It won't bring them back,” Luke says. There was a rage in Ben’s eyes he couldn't remember seeing before, and Luke thought that maybe it was merciful that his father had covered his eyes. “It won't bring back your son.” 

Leia’s hand shakes in his, but her face doesn't waver. “I have to try,” she says. 

“I can't,” he says simply. “I can't go with you. Not this time.” 

Leia doesn't seem surprised by that either. “I know where to find you,” she says, and pulls him into an embrace. Luke returns it, holding on as tight as he can. 

“You know where to find me,” he says, and doesn't tell her it won't be here. 

“Luke,” she says as she pulls away, “I'm so sorry.” 

Luke thinks, there's nothing to be sorry for, that everything he’s ever resented her for is immaterial now, because their loss is the same, their fault is the same. She deserves better, he thinks, but then they both did. 

“I'm sorry too,” Luke says. 

*** 

Luke tells Rey that she’s ready to leave on a cold, foggy morning when she can barely see two feet outside their door, let alone all the way to another galaxy. 

“I'm not,” Rey blurts immediately. “I can't go, I can't do that alone.” 

But she knows it isn't true. The truth is that she just doesn't want to go. She always dreamed of seeing the universe, and of course, she still wants to, but now she also knows that the universe wants her, specifically, dead. 

And even though there are people she’d very much like to see again - Finn, for one, and Leia - nothing has ever felt as much like home as living here on this empty planet, with just Luke. 

“No one will ever be more ready than you are now,” Luke says. 

Family, Rey realizes, that's how she thinks of him. She hopes that, since neither of them have much left of their own, that he might feel that too. 

“I can't do it alone,” Rey says again. 

“”You won't have to,” Luke says, and puts a hand on her shoulder. “I think it's time I lend the rebellion a hand.” 

Rey closes her eyes. She breathes deep, trying to focus like a Jedi. Slowly, gradually, she opens them again. 

"Tell me a story, she says. "Tell me a story where we win." 

Luke smiles at her softly. "I only know the beginning," he says. "It starts with a girl from Jakku."


End file.
